Rupal Mittal

Post Doctoral Researcher

Contact Information

Office

CAR 2124

Phone

(585) 475-4376

Email

rmittal@astro.rit.edu

Research Interests

I'm a postdoctoral associate based at Rochester Institute of Technology since 2009. My research focuses on exploiting galaxy clusters as astrophysical laboratories to understand the interplay between the cooling of the intracluster medium and AGN heating. I'm one of the lead analysts of the Herschel Key Program, "Constraining the cold gas and dust in Cluster Cooling Flows" (PI: Alastair Edge, 140 hrs), the main goals of which are to understand the role of cold gas and dust, and star formation in brightest cluster galaxies in cool-core galaxy clusters.

I received my doctorate in April 2006 from the Max-Planck-Institut fuer Radioastronomie, Bonn. My PhD research work was related to the image flux ratio anomaly in the doubly-imaged strong gravitational lens system JVAS B0218+357, which I studied using the radio technique of very long baseline interferometry. Since then, my research interests have expanded into the field of galaxy clusters and, in particular, to address the issues concerning the cooling flows observed in galaxy clusters. In May 2007, I joined Thomas Reiprich's Emmy Noether Research Group at AIfA, Bonn University, to work on the SPP project with the sample of HIFLUGCS galaxy clusters.